China: Safety last?

Enforcement of safety standards has taken a backseat with China's rapid development

In this story: Deadly fires Lethal mines Lax industrial safety RELATED STORIES

By Lisa Weaver
CNN Beijing reporter

More than 20 years into the swing of economic reform, the pursuit of profit often drives construction and production too fast for safety regulators to keep up with.

China's labor force is paying the price.

China's mines are among the most dangerous in the world, leading authorities to recently push for better, more enforceable regulations.

And entertainment and shopping facilities often go up so fast that basic fire safety is overlooked - a point brought painfully home to the relatives of more than 300 people who died in a blaze the day after Christmas in Luoyang, Henan Province.

Deadly fires

It was among the worst fires of its kind in the past decade and was made all the more deadly because of the poisonous gases created when building materials in the lower floors of the building rose to suffocate party goers in a top floor disco.

Last year's disco fire in Luoyang claimed more than 300 lives

A few who dared to jump survived - most died of smoke inhalation. Many of the bodies were found piled tragically at the disco's only exit.

More than 300 people crammed into the ill ventilated room with no fire escapes and no sprinklers.

Grieving relatives hit the streets in the days that followed, peacefully protesting local inaction when it became clear the building had repeatedly failed fire inspection yet had been allowed to operate.

Thousands of angry relatives in the streets of Luoyang and lining up at the morgue to identify the bodies of their loved ones reminded authorities that a lack of official accountability could galvanize public sentiment.

Arrests were made and an investigation launched.

A nationwide safety campaign was announced in the days that followed. But prevention, it was clear, lay not in more regulations but in more consistent enforcement.

Six years earlier, in December 1994, 323 people, most of them children, died in a concert hall blaze in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China's far west.

Just a month before that, 233 were killed in a dance hall in Liaoning Province, many of them crushed or asphyxiated inside emergency exits that were chained shut.

In China's worst fire on record, nearly 700 died in a 1977 blaze in Xinjiang Autonomous Region.

Lethal mines

China's mines are among the most dangerous in the world.

Thousands of miners die every year in illegal Chinese mines

In the worst recent mining disaster, 107 miners were killed in a mine explosion in the southern province of Guizhou last September.

The will to improve mining safety, if not always the methods, is high on the authorities' agenda.

In southern China alone, nearly 3,000 coal mines have been closed in the past two years.

The safety sweep was a reaction to the high casualties suffered by Chinese miners.

In the first 10 months of last year nearly 5,000 people were killed in mining accidents nationwide. China's State Coal Mine Safety Supervision Bureau reacted late last year by issuing regulations aimed at standardizing mining safety.

The problem, though, lies mostly in the country's thousands of small, privately managed mines.

In a sign that local officials often look the other way as unlicensed mines operate, 15 government leaders in Shanxi Province were given administrative punishments in the wake of one accident.

Lax industrial safety

China's official union umbrella group, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions has been lobbying more actively for worker safety in recent years, giving the issue a public face inside China's network of state run enterprises and factories.

China's labor force has had little legal fallback in the event of injury

In these more established factories as well as in privately run enterprises, the devastating human cost of cutting safety corners is increasingly hard to hide.

A young woman who lost both arms earlier this year in a Shenzhen factory was awarded China's largest compensation payout.

The landmark resolution was a sign that legal redress may begin to curb unsafe labor practices where regulations have failed.

The Shenzhen Futian District Court in February ruled that the Jinlong Woolen Down Cloth Factory pay 29 year old Liu Tao HK $475,000 in damages.

But Liu was lucky.

Legal aid offices in China are flooded with cases of migrant laborers who suffer horrific injuries on the job, but often have no redress in a legal system just beginning to grapple with civil claims.

China lacks an effective monitoring network for safety abuses.

Indeed, efforts to set up independent labor unions are often met with arrest.

Cao Maobin, an electrician in a state-owned silk factory in Jiangsu Province, lead co-workers to lobby for better safety protection late last year.

He was detained and subsequently held in a psychiatric facility.

China cracks down on illegal mines
Christmas fire kills hundreds in central China

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